


The Scrivener

by blessedthrice



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon, Drabble, Erwin and Levi, M/M, eruri - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-05
Updated: 2016-07-05
Packaged: 2018-07-21 18:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7398616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blessedthrice/pseuds/blessedthrice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The smile he offers is tight, but genuine. He is always grateful for these small gifts, although he has learned not to mention it out loud. Levi has never been one for compliments, hates to be the center of attention--even if it is only Erwin who is noticing him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Scrivener

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dykejonze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dykejonze/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Inkblot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7285315) by [dykejonze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dykejonze/pseuds/dykejonze). 



The letter from the capital is waiting on his desk when he returns, smooth, milky pages glinting in the waning light from the window. It is handsome, pressed and sealed in green wax, folded so pristinely that he is sure it must be someone’s precise job to crease these types of documents, as beautiful as they are austere. 

He is impressed. Usually it is several days before he receives their tokens of disapproval. Never before has one arrived before him, lying in wait like an adder in the grass. They are getting very efficient.

Erwin doesn’t bother to open it. He knows what it says, and he is hardly in the mood. Instead, he drops a stack of reports on top of the thing, sliding into his chair with a low moan that seems to come from deep inside of him, from the dust of his bones and the threads of his muscles--from the red of his blood. He lays his head into his open palms, the heels of his hands pressing hard against his eyelids until he sees inkblots. When he opens his eyes they are still there, flickering across the walls of his office, the spines of his books. The room feels smaller, as though it has begun to shrink. 

The paperwork is endless. He throws himself into it like a pebble in a wheel, anxious to halt, to stop, to still. If he cannot be weak, then he will be impenetrable. There are no more inbetweens. 

In truth, he hardly feels their deaths. They are merely figures, names scrawled elegantly in his feminine cursive, faces made blank by a mind eager to defend--if not itself, then its cause. Its priorities. He notes their eviscerations the way he notes the budget reports, the weather--concise and clinical, with little room for speculation. 

Erwin is so engrossed in his work that he hardly notices the appearance of a garish yellow pot holder, nor the blue kettle that is set tenderly on top of it. The teacup is practically in his lap by the time he lifts his head at all, steaming and chipped at the rim where he’d dropped it once, in his clumsiness. It is still his favorite, although he isn’t sure exactly how it is that Levi knows that. 

“Hello, Levi.”

The smile he offers is tight, but genuine. He is always grateful for these small gifts, although he has learned not to mention it out loud. Levi has never been one for compliments, hates to be the center of attention--even if it is only Erwin who is noticing him. 

The man in question is seated like a cat on his desk, one leg folded neatly over the other, cup of tea clutched in his small hand and gray eyes fixed on a point beyond the window that Erwin cannot see. 

“Hello, Erwin.”

Levi looks at him, gray eyes flicking back and forth across his face like a metronome. There is a question lingering there, in the tension between Levi’s eye brows. Erwin answers it with a sigh, laying down his quill as though he is laying down a sword. 

Levi doesn’t need to tell him that he understands. It’s in the cracks around his fingernails, in the rough red skin on his hands, in the purple bruises beneath his eyes. Up all night again, Erwin is sure of it. If he’s learned anything sharing close quarters with the man over the years, it is that he is prone to nightmares. The desire to reach across their distance and cup those chapped hands in his is stronger than ever, although he is certain it is everything but professional. 

“I need to hire a scribe, I think,” he says, although he isn’t sure what it has to do with anything. He glances down at the barrage of papers between them and massages at his aching wrist. “Someone to copy my reports for the capital.”

He looks up at Levi then, blue eyes glinting with a rare mischievousness. 

“If you want to know a secret, I hate to do it myself. I find it extraordinarily tedious.”

Levi doesn’t smile, but pauses, eyes fixed on Erwin’s so intently that he almost looks away. He doesn’t. He holds the gaze with equal intensity, and when Levi’s eyes return to the window he can feel red blood crawling up his neck and settling in his cheeks. 

It is several days later when he notices it. He turns the desk over, yanks open drawers, and even rummages through his garbage bin looking for them. Several of his reports have gone missing, and he’s just received a second letter from the capital demanding to see them. He is on his hands and knees, crawling along the floor, peeking under his bookcases, when it occurs to him. Levi has been in his office nearly everyday this week, methodically scrubbing the place clean bit by bit. 

He stands, bones snapping into place as he grabs hold of his jacket and tiredly yanks it over his arms. 

Levi’s office is just up the hall from his, a small, excruciatingly tidy room that he doesn’t believe the man utilizes very often. He prefers to be out on the grounds, training with the recruits, or else perched on Erwin’s desk like some sort of gargoyle, protective and silent. 

Erwin is sure that Levi must have misplaced the reports, perhaps had assumed, incorrectly, that they were ready to be filed. Filing is something Levi enjoys and Erwin finds to be exceptionally miserable. It is a workable trade-off, considering recent events. 

Erwin’s stomach clenches, his jaw taut as he remembers cracked, red skin, pools of black ink, and the crooked, wobbling letters of someone who had never before held a pen in his hand. He has never mentioned it to Levi again, has never pushed for an explanation.

It seems particularly insensitive and brutish that he had assumed anything other than the reality in the first place, and he is embarrassed by the obvious privileges he has had over the smaller man, whose intelligence he admires far more than many of the academics he’s met in the capital. Still, he knows what people would say, knows how humiliated Levi would feel if anyone ever found out. He knows already what people say about the man from the underground. 

Levi isn’t in his room when Erwin opens the door. The small office is as sterile as ever, dusted and polished to the point of seeming neurotic. The window is open, illuminating the gold embossed spines of books that sit, mockingly beautiful on the bookcases behind the desk. They are as impersonal as the man himself can seem, but Erwin knows better. He knows what to look for. 

A well-used stool, tucked neatly beneath a high shelf. Rows of unique and delicate teapots, some with matching cups and saucers. In the corner, two silver knitting needles glinting in a basket of brightly colored yarn, a half-finished scarf billowing over the side. A plush red chair, indented by a small body, and accented by a thick quilt blanket that Levi has had since he came to the Corps. A worn space in the floor, paced clean by the soles of heavy boots. 

These are Levi’s little details. His signifiers. 

What strikes Erwin as immediately unusual, distinctly un-Levi-ish, is the scattering of papers spread out across the typically empty desk. There are dozens of them, lying around the desk in stacks of two. In the center, a half blank page sits beside a complete one, one that he recognizes as a page from his missing report. He can tell his tight, feminine scrawl from across the room, can spot the flourish he puts on his t’s. 

Erwin crosses the small office in no more than three strides, coming slowly to stand behind the desk, heart thudding against his ribs like a drum. 

His hand shakes, unsteady as he reaches out, pulling the half-blank page towards him. It is a scrawl he recognizes, blotchy, and shaking, and insecure. The words are hardly legible, peppered by mistakes, lines crossing out and sentences collapsing in. He recognizes them though, would know them anywhere. They are his words, repeated. Copied out. 

It is then that he notices the book, hidden beneath several cast off pages. It is a children’s writing companion, an exercise book that Erwin might have learned to write from when he’d first started school. He wonders vaguely where Levi found it. Beside it sits another stack of books, these ones small and unlike the tomes ordered neatly on the shelf behind him. They are simple, old children’s stories with large typeset and pictures on their pages. When he is done flipping through them he puts them back exactly how he found them, as though he’d never noticed them at all. 

Back in his own office, he is certain now that the room is shrinking. It is nearly dark, hours past the dinner bell. Silver ribbons of moonlight catch the heavy lines around his eyes and mouth, illuminating the burden of the world that he carries on his shoulders. When the door opens, he doesn’t look up. 

Levi lights a candle on his desk, presses a cup of tea into his hands. 

“You kicking your own ass again, old man?”

Erwin offers a tight, but genuine smile. 

“Thank you, Levi,” he says softly. “For the tea.”

Levi’s eyes widen for just a moment, glinting with anxiety that Erwin can recognize. For a moment there is a universe in Levi’s eyes, whole lifetimes, and then they relax, cool and cold, as though they had never been disturbed.

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys, special thanks to dykejonze, my partner, for writing part 1 of this series, which you can find [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7285315)! 
> 
> as always, i am v grateful for the kudos and comments! hope you guys enjoyed this


End file.
